Israel Air Force says seized Iranian drone is a knockoff of US Sentinel

TEL AVIV, Israel — A senior Israeli Air Force officer told reporters Monday that the Iranian drone it intercepted over the weekend was a “copy” of a stealthy U.S.-built RQ-170 Sentinel downed by Iranian forces over Iranian territory in 2011. “It’s a copy of a similar system that fell in Iran,” Brig. Gen. Tomer Bar, chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force, said of the drone in Israel’s possession, which he identified as Shahed 171. “They more or less duplicated it … but I won’t grade them,” said Bar, referring to Iran’s reverse engineering capabilities. Iran released a video of the Shahed 171 in flight back in 2014. Two years later, Iran showed another knockoff based on the Lockheed Martin Sentinel, an armed version known as the Saeqeh, according to Tal Inbar, director of the UAV and space program at Israel’s Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies. “T...